NEWSROOM: SEPTEMBER 13, 2007

Paterno Plans to Be Retired by 90

Joe Paterno said he would not be coaching 10 years from now at age 90, or maybe eight years from now at age 88, in answering a question Tuesday about the possible renewal of a series with Notre Dame. Here's how it went:

After the atmosphere you had for the game last weekend, is there any chance we would see a Notre Dame-Penn State rivalry down the road pick up again every year?

You're talking to the wrong guy about that. I really have very little to do with scheduling. Tim Curley has enough problems without having a coach who won't be here 10 years from now when you're scheduling, telling him who you have to schedule.

It's a hard job. When we went to 12 games it kind of changed the whole environment of who you play, who you don't play. We've gone to the situation where we have to have seven home games because football has to support a lot of things.

I don't know. I think that would be up to -- a question you could ask Tim Curley, but it wouldn't happen for a long time. Maybe 10 years from now we might be able to get Notre Dame back on, I don't know.

The football world right now is really in flux, particularly, you know, there's -- does the Big Ten go to 12 teams, does it go to round-robin? Does it do this? Does it do that? There are a lot of things being discussed that will have some bearing on who we're going to play.

Then, we're under a tremendous amount of pressure. I say "we," but it doesn't bother me as much as it has to bother Tim and Fran (Ganter) in the sense that people said, “Play your old rivalries,” so we got Syracuse. We haven't played Syracuse in a long time.

When we scheduled Syracuse, they just came off a 10-2 year. They had a Penn State kid coaching up there, Paul Pasqualoni. That looked like a good arrangement. Some people say, “Why don't you play Nebraska?” So now we’ve got Nebraska on our schedule in the future.

I mean, that's the way it goes. We're working with Virginia on a schedule because we have some connections with Virginia. Pitt would like to play us, and we would like to play Pitt. But we can't play Pitt home-and-home because we wouldn't end up with seven home games. There's a lot of things that go into it.

Whether Notre Dame factors into that and we end up playing Notre Dame, really, I don't know. If they come to me and say, Hey, we want to play Notre Dame in 2014, what do you think? “Yeah, I might like to watch that game (laughter). Who's going to be the head coach?”